The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
When the leaden sky came down to meet the angry sea, the island disappeared. Corson put the nose of the craft into the teeth of the wind and tried to hold her there. She kept sheering off, rolling heavily, like a creature alive and wanting to flee in panic.
The rain was icy after the heat of the day. One moment the diesels labored so hard it seemed they would quit; the next, they tried to tear themselves out of their mountings as the prow of the Peri wallowed heavily and the screws screamed free.
It was up to Corson now.
We stayed topside, Peri at Marty’s side, keeping her fear under tight control.
The Peri shuddered as she crested, the wind tearing at her. She fell like a toboggan, her stern free, her prow slicing to the depths of the watery trough. She met the wall of water with a booming crash. Her stability was gone, and the water swept her decks clean, pouring into her depths.
I heard Peri scream Marty’s name. Then panic blanked everything else from my mind as the world turned to angry black water.
I felt Corson’s weight slam into me. His arms grabbed for me. I slugged at him and clawed my way toward the surface.
Something hard slammed against my shoulder. I grabbed it, locked my arms about it. We’d all had on life preservers, of course, but they wouldn’t keep a man from drowning in this weather. The short length of broken mast helped.
I was under the surface more often than not as the water roiled over me. But I was alive, and I clung to the mast and gagged out water — and heard her cry out Marty’s name once again. It was a very feeble cry, but I knew she must be close. The human voice was no competition for the angry bellow of the wind.
I glimpsed her face, a few feet away. I worked the mast toward her. I felt the dizzying pitching and knew another mass of water was coiled over us. I grabbed her arm. As we went under, she was almost torn away. The water parted, and she put her arms across the mast, gagging and coughing. She never stopped saying his name for long. Only when there was no breath in her did she refrain from calling for Marty.
I felt the warm sand of a beach beneath my back, and opened my eyes. The sky was blue, bland, capriciously innocent. There was a stillness, broken only by the light surf breaking with faint, rasping sounds.
I sat up, remembering the blow, the touch of solid bottom beneath my feet. Remembering that I had dragged her with me until I’d collapsed.
My wild, swinging gaze jerked to a halt. She lay near me. I could almost reach out and touch her. She was a carven, golden image there on the quiet beach.
As I stood up, she stirred. She looked at me blankly. Then her eyes darkened, deepened. She sat up and looked toward the sea.
“We made it to the island,” I said.
“Marty...” she said.
“Maybe he made it too.”
She didn’t look at me. “No,” she said. “He didn’t.
I kneeled beside her and touched her shoulder. “Don’t borrow trouble. Let’s not decide about Marty until we know for sure.”
She sat looking at the sea, not feeling my touch.
A voice from down the beach called, “Hallo, there!”
The sea still held her attention, for it was Ralph Corson’s voice she heard.
He came walking up the beach, his clothing stiff with salt and sand j£ He stood breathing heavily. “I’ve been looking for you. I was beginning to think I was the only one who made it.”
“There’s no sign of Marty,” she said.
“No,” Corson said.
She made no move, sitting as if nothing could surprise or hurt her.
“We re on the island,” Corson said. “It appears to be a sizeable strip of land. I reckon we re somewhere southwest by south of Ten Thousand Islands. I think we can manage, until somebody picks us up.”
He looked down at her. “We’ve got some immediate problems to think about.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said dully. “Just give me a little while.”
Corson jerked his head. I followed him as he moved away. We walked toward the interior of the island. It was heavily grown with palms, palmetto, low brush. As we moved into the jungle, I said, “Something’s on your mind.”
“We may have to call this place home for quite awhile,” Corson said. “We’re off the shipping and air lanes.”
“The Coast Guard will search.”
“Maybe. But where do they start? Where do they look? Ten Thousand Islands may be a part of the United States, but even that area has never been explored. From this point, civilization might as well be a million miles away.”
I was sweating heavily; from the dense heat, and from his words.
“Somebody will find us,” I said doggedly.
“Or what’s left of the Peri,” Corson said. A wolfish grin came to his face. “At least we won’t starve — as long as you and the woman follow my orders.”
“You fancy yourself king of this island, Corson?”
“Damn right I do. I’ve lived in swamp country. I know how to live off the land. Without me, you and her wouldn’t last a week.”
I sensed the unleashed arrogance in Corson-I thought that if anything happened to me she’d be here alone with him.
It seemed we had to accept a king, for a little time, anyway.
Corson hadn’t been boasting when he said he knew how to live off the land.
Our first problem was water. In a small, sandy clearing near the center of the island, Corson and I dug with sticks. We scooped out a shallow pan, four feet across, nearly three feet deep. There was dampness, and from the dampness came the seepage of water.
“It’ll be brackish,” Corson said, wiping sweat from his face with his forearm. “It’ll have the taste of the sea, but it’ll sustain life.”
The next three days ran together in an endless moment of heat, toil, hunger, with only the meaty buds of the wild cabbage palm to stave of! starvation.
Corson spared himself no more than he spared Peri and me. Under his direction we gathered the wild thistle that Seminole tribes once used to mix with water and make a form of bread. We dug coontie root, scrounged bird and turtle eggs. We explored every inch of the island, until we knew where snakes might be had for emergency rations.
Wildlife was plentiful, hares, field mice, swarms of birds. We set snares and deadfalls. We fashioned crude, basket-like crab traps from strips of palm frond, baiting them with putrid meat after our traps began operating. We had vines and plaited palm fibers for cordage, and when we hauled in the first of the crabs, I looked at the size and numbers of them, and I shuddered, thinking of Marty.
There were wild bananas on the island. As for vegetables, Corson assured us that a human being could eat practically anything growing out of the earth so long as it did not run milky sap when broken.
We gathered the largest shells on the beach for cooking and eating utensils.
One of Corson’s very first achievements was fire. He took the crystal from Peri’s useless diamond-studded wristwatch. It was convex, to magnify the delicate numbers on the watch face. Corson piled a bit of tender dried grass near the edge of the jungle. He crushed more of the grass to make a volatile powder and added it to the pile. Then for a solid hour he crouched in the merciless heat, concentrating the power of the sun through the tiny watch crystal. Finally, the grass began to smoke around the pin-point of sun fire that Corson held so steadily on a single spot. We lighted sticks and carried our fire to our campsite beside the spring Corson and I had made.
And then it seemed that quite suddenly our time of exhaustion, of drugged sleep alternating with periods of violent activity, was over.